Senior​/Principal Software Autonomy Engineer

Los Angeles, CA | On-site | Re-location Package available

$160K–$230K base + early-stage equity

US Citizens / Green Card holders only

MBN Solutions is partnering with a highly ambitious, venture-backed defence technology company developing next-generation autonomous systems for operation in complex, GPS- and communications-denied environments.

We're looking for a Senior Autonomy Software Engineer to take significant technical ownership of a greenfield autonomy and perception stack for a new autonomous robotic platform.

This isn't a role maintaining an established autonomy architecture.

You'll be helping design, build, integrate and deploy the stack from the ground up
, taking autonomy software from initial architecture through simulation and hardware integration to real-world field deployment.

You'll work across areas including:

• Mission and behaviour planning
• Path and trajectory planning
• Obstacle detection and avoidance
• Object detection, recognition and classification
• Computer vision and machine learning
• Classical + ML-based perception
• Sensor fusion
• Embedded autonomy
• Simulation, SIL and HIL validation
• Real-world robotic deployment

A major part of the challenge is getting sophisticated autonomy and perception algorithms running reliably on power-constrained embedded compute
, including NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX.

This means we're particularly interested in engineers who understand the difference between developing algorithms in simulation and actually getting them to work reliably, efficiently and repeatedly on physical hardware in uncontrolled environments
.

Ideally, you'll have 5+ years' experience across autonomy, robotics, perception or adjacent software engineering disciplines, with strong production-level capability in:

C++ and Python

Alongside experience in several of:

ROS / ROS2 | OpenCV | PyTorch | Tensor Flow | CUDA | NVIDIA Jetson | Linux | Docker | Sensor Fusion | Computer Vision | Machine Learning | SIL/HIL Simulation

Most importantly, we're looking for builders
.

Engineers who have owned systems beyond the algorithm itself — requirements, architecture, implementation, integration, testing, debugging, field validation and production deployment.

Experience with autonomous vehicles, UAS/UAVs, maritime autonomy, UUV/AUV systems, mobile robotics, defence autonomy or other safety/mission-critical robotic platforms would translate particularly well.

This is an unusually greenfield autonomy problem.

There is no mature stack to inherit and optimise around. You'll have the opportunity to make foundational architectural decisions and see your software transition quickly from development environments onto real autonomous hardware operating in the field
.

The team is deliberately small, highly technical and operates with a strong Responsible Engineer philosophy — engineers own what they build from initial requirements through deployment.